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The Pittsburgh Speakers Series

Monday, April 21, 2014

The Pittsburgh Speakers Series presented by RMU wrapped up its 2013-14 season with a talk by world-renowned historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Goodwin is the author of several best-selling books, a regular contributor to leading national publications, appears regularly on television, and was the first female journalist to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room. Shortly after his election in 2008, President Barack Obama named Goodwin’s 2005 biography Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln as the book he would choose over any other to add to the White House library. Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln, which featured an Oscar-winning performance by Daniel Day Lewis in the title role, was based on Team of Rivals.

Goodwin’s latest work is The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Displaying the author’s distinctive ability to combine scholarly rigor with accessibility, the book examines leadership in a rare moment of activism and reform that brought the country closer to its founding ideals.

Born and raised on Long Island, Goodwin graduated from Colby College in Maine and earned a Ph.D. in government from Harvard. She went on to become an assistant to Lyndon Johnson in his last year in the White House, later helping Johnson to prepare his memoirs. Goodwin’s 1976 biography, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, was a New York Times best-seller. Her next best-selling biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, was made into a six-hour ABC miniseries; the next, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II, won numerous literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Goodwin’s memoir, Wait Till Next Year, about growing up in the ‘50s in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers, was a Book of the Month Club selection.

She is married to Richard Goodwin, who helped uncover the quiz show scandals of the late ‘50s and then become a speechwriter and advisor for presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The Goodwins have three sons.

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